On Sociological Turn Of Kuhn's Philosophy Of Science

With strong dialectical feature in his ideology, Kuhn has opened up a road to bind scientific-rationality dimension and cultural-social dimension.To be exact, Kuhn's ideology is different from the traditional philosopher of science, he outlined a new image of science by injecting the factors of culture, society and history into science, and exploring the cultural and social activities from scientific communities itself.The sociological turn of Kuhn's philosophy of science is neither the same with Merton's Sociology of Science (which regards science as a "black box" to discuss its relationship with the external economy, politics, and culture) nor alike in Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (which, attaching more importance to the social construction process of knowledge, constructs knowledge by making use of social factors), Kuhn's ideology holds that the development of scientific thinking and theory is a process integrated with a great number of cultural, social and historical ingredients from many scientists, because this process is both a cause of scientific rationalism and an application of a purely scientific methodology.The change of science from rational cognitive activities to social experimental activities, which is its starting point and foothold, symbolizes Kuhn's sociological turn. In another word, if we acknowledge Paradigm as the belief of social experimental activities, scientific communities as its subject, normal science as its era, and the shift from one science to another the scientific revolutions, we know that science obtains an endless longevity through the regular alternations between normal science and scientific revolutions.On the other hand, since it has tried to maintain rather than abandon the essential tension between the dimension of scientific rationality and the dimension of cultural society, Kuhn's sociological turn is a science-based and rational one. In this case, the present paper, taking Kuhn's ideology with scientific basis into consideration, through the analytical exploration of its scientific philosophy, tends to show the important role of cultural, social and historical factors in the advancement of scientific thinking. From this point, the present study, staring from the perspective of the entire social, historical and cultural background to comprehend science, can be of great significance in bringing science and humanities closer to each other, broadening the research horizon of western philosophy, and facilitating the communication between Anglo-American analytic philosophy and European continental philosophy.This paper is divided into five chapters. Chapter One is the historical origins and theoretical backgrounds of Kuhn's ideology; Chapter Two offers an overview of Kuhn's philosophy of science from a vertical and historical perspective; Chapter Three briefly discusses horizontally Kuhn's sociological turn from the angle of the progressive logic of his ideology; Chapter Four analyzes the social impact of his ideology, and Chapter Five ends the study with a review of the sociological turn of his philosophy of science.